Technological Creativity and Cheap Labour? Explaining the Growing International Competitiveness of German Mechanical Engineering before World War I

Labuske Kirsten and Streb Jochen
Additional contact information
Labuske Kirsten: University of Tuebingen, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz,Tübingen, Germany
Streb Jochen: University of Hohenheim, Schloß Hohenheim 1,Stuttgart, Germany

German Economic Review, 2008, vol. 9, issue 1, 65-86

Abstract: Which factors caused the growing international competitiveness of German mechanical engineering industry in the pre-World War I period? In this paper, we want to address this question and elucidate whether or not the international market success of machine builders in the German Empire was determined by technological creativity and the availability of a comparatively cheap labour force. Based on an unbalanced panel, we therefore investigate the influence of demand, labour costs and technological creativity on export performance of 32 different machinery types. We find robust evidence that the development of export- import ratios in mechanical engineering was positively influenced by the growth of patent stocks that represent the new knowledge being available for German machine builders. In addition, we present some evidence for the assumption that the growing international competitiveness of German mechanical engineering was also caused by decreasing relative unit labour cost.

Keywords: International competitiveness; German Empire; mechanical engineering; patent stocks; real wage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2008.00422.x (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:germec:v:9:y:2008:i:1:p:65-86

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ger/html

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0475.2008.00422.x

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Peter Egger, Almut Balleer, Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma, Mario Larch, Aderonke Osikominu and Georg Wamser

More articles in German Economic Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().